The Season of Death and Dreams

It astonishes me how one season can be both profoundly beautiful and profoundly sad. When I was ten years old my family moved from a small industrial city to prison housing in a rural farming community. At the time, my father was the assistant warden of a maximum security prison, and high level staff and their families were expected to live on the grounds. Although we made the move in late August, for me, my seven years there are frozen in autumn. Our home, one of four, was set upon a hill. In back of our house-forest. In front of our house-fields. And if you looked past those fields, you could see a medium security prison looming on the horizon. It was an isolating and lonely existence, and, no matter how beautiful the landscape was, for a child used to a neighborhood and city kids, it was, well, sad. In my memory…